Uncategorized

Along about the first of the year, I framed a goal to set aside enough to pay off a small second mortgage I took out to renovate the Investment House. At that time, about $23,500 was owing on the original $25,000 loan, which has an interest rate of 6.5 percent. I would like to have this loan paid off by the time I retire, in three to seven years.

The loan’s monthly payments are small and easily affordable on my current salary. I decided that rather than paying directly toward principal, I would save enough to pay it off in one swell foop when I retire (or have the equivalent amount in savings should I sell the house before paying off the loan). I created a second income stream by taking on a couple of classes at one of my beloved employer’s satellite campuses. Because those courses were double-enrolled and I threatened at the last minute (when I learned about this) not to accept an FTE workload in addition to my real full-time job, the university agreed to pay me for four sections. This serendipitous fiasco added $1,676 to my monthly take-home pay!

Hence, the strategy: deposit $838 per paycheck to Vanguard’s Prime Money Market Fund, plus the $250/month I figured I could spare from my regular income. Add my income tax refund to it. Label this money the Renovation Loan Fund, and set it aside to pay off the loan and to double as an extra emergency fund. Meanwhile, snowflake down the principal with budget underruns and any small windfalls.

With the final $838 of the semester winging its way to Vanguard, we can see that this scheme is working nicely.

The principal itself is now snowflaked down to $$22,583, an $880 improvement.

The Renovation Loan Stash is up to $17,119. So, if I wanted to pay off the second mortgage today, all I’d have to come up with is about $5,465. If pushed, I could do it. If I sold the house today, the entire amount of principal could come out of the sale price, and I’d still have a substantial part of that amount in savings to put help buy another house.

While snowflaking is very nice-the $880 principal reduction is way better than a hit on the head-clearly the key to effective savings on a modest salary is to establish a second income stream!

If you rally need to pay down a loan or put money aside in savings (and who doesn’t?) and your salary is pegged firmly in the middle to low range, the fastest and most efficient solution is to get a second job or start a small enterprise on the side. Then apply all the net income from that second income stream to your goal.

Now that the teaching gig is over, I’ve picked up a little freelance proofreading job. Pay is low, but hey: I’m getting paid to read detective novels! By the end of 2007, that should pay at least $4,000. If I can also spare $250 a month from my paycheck, the resulting $5,500 stash will be enough to pay off the loan.

Cheap Eats is a day late, yesterday having been a bit on the hectic side, but it’s not a dollar short. Here’s a yummy, economical meatless spaghetti meal, cadged from a television program whose name I don’t recall.

You need…

• A handful or two of walnuts (other kinds of nuts will work: almonds, pine nuts, pistachios, cashews)
• A wad of spaghetti
• Olive oil
• Sage leaves
• Water
• Optional: canned pepper such as pimiento or roasted chili pepper, cut into small pieces
• A little chopped Italian parsley, if desired
• Parmesan cheese

Bring a large pot of water to the boil.

While this is heating, pour enough olive oil into a frying pan to skim the bottom nicely. Heat the olive oil. Take a few sage leaves (about half a dozen) and place them in the oil. Let them crisp up a bit, but don’t scorch. Add a generous couple of handfuls of nuts. Brown the nuts in the olive oil. If you like, after the nuts are nicely browned, add a few pieces of canned pepper.

When the water comes to a boil, cook the spaghetti al dente.

Drain the spaghetti in a colander, then toss with the nuts and olive oil. Serve it up with plenty of Parmesan cheese. Sprinkle on a little chopped parsley at the last minute.

Accompanied with a tossed green salad, this makes a full meal and is truly good to eat.

A walloping wind storm blew up this morning, just as my friend and I were heading out for our morning walk. What a sirocco it was! We saw a patio umbrella fly through the air over a neighbor’s roof, like Mary Poppins’s brolly without the Mary. And on my way home, who should I meet but a fire hydrant wearing a bright red hat! A nice one, too, and in practically brand-new condition. I rescued the lost chapeau and brought it home. If no one puts up a “lost” flyer, it’s mine. Believe I’ll give it a purple hat band.

Meanwhile, various things are going on in other parts of the world:

J.D. at Get Rich Slowly finds a secret millionaire living next door.

Five-Cent Nickel starts a conversation on the qualities (or not) of CFLs.

Mrs. Micah opens an envelope and finds a dunning letter from a collection agency-nothing actually due, but the hassle leads her to describe what you should do if you find a collection letter in your mailbox.

Paid Twice has a mellow reflection on the psychology of budgeting.

In the reflection department, Plonkee has posted several lately. Today’s has to do with why one likes one’s job.

SVB at The Digerati Life launches a discussion of why long-term investing beats short-term trading.

Over at the Simple Dollar, Trent is expecting a zillion-dollar tax rebate…well, make that $1,800. And he aint’ buyin’ a TV with it.

At Queercents, Paula has an interesting post on what networking is really all about.

Come to think of it, I’d better get off the Internet and make a reservation for the next book publishers’ association meeting. ‘Bye!

My car gets about 18 miles a gallon. Coincidentally, my office at the Great Desert University is just about 18 miles from my house. So when gasoline sells at $3.50 a gallon, it costs me $7 a day to drive back and forth to work, or about $140 a month. That’s from the git-go: before driving to the nearest decent grocery store (about eight miles round-trip), to the Costco (about 10 miles round-trip), to the nearest Home Depot (about 16 miles round trip). Unless I’m careful, the monthly gas bill could easily add up to $200…quite a jump over an $80 tab just a few months ago.

Here are a few strategies I’ve come up with to try to keep a grip:

*Carry as little weight as possible. I’d already removed two of the four back seats from the van, to accommodate two large dogs. Since I never carry more than one human passenger, I took another seat out, leaving lots more room in the cargo compartment and lightening the car’s load by about 50 pounds. Allegedly, lightening up can improve your gas mileage by 1% to 2% per 100 pounds; so the absence of that extra seat should make things .5% to 1% better.

Drive slower on the freeways. To avoid confrontations with aggressive drivers, I watch for slow-moving traffic and then queue up behind it. The impatient folks jerking around me and my fellow tortoises pay an extra 18 cents to $1.16 a gallon for their bullying habits. Meanwhile, I save 40 cents a gallon by driving 60 mph instead of 70 mph.

Drive with overdrive on. It not only saves wear and tear on the engine at higher speeds, it also saves gas.

*Turn off the engine whenever a wait is more than a few seconds, such as at Costco’s gas lines, at a drive-through, or at an endless train crossing. Avoiding idling can save as much as 19%.

Keep the engine in good working order and keep the tires inflated to the recommended pressure. Although Edmunds’s tests found tire inflation made little or no difference in gas mileage, driving on low tires causes unnecessary wear on the tires and may be less safe.

*Build careful shopping lists and buy only at stores that are on the way to and from work. This lets out Home Depot, which has no outlets on any of my routes. However, there’s an Ace right on the way, in the same strip shopping center as a grocery store. Buying hardware and home maintenance items there allows me to buy necessities without having to rack up any extra gas mileage. Ditto picking up the groceries on the way home, instead of waiting till the weekend to go shopping. Safeway, Basha’s, two AJ’s markets, and two Costco stores are directly on my way.

Telecommute as much as possible. Working at home one day a week saves 20% on the cost of driving to campus: $7 a week or $28 a month.

*Use a day of vacation time now and again to engineer three- and four-day weekends, cutting another commute whenever possible.

Always use American Express’s 3-2-1 card for gasoline purchases. When regular unleaded is selling for $3.50, the 3% kickback on gas is the equivalent of 10 cents a gallon.

That’s about it. I can’t bicycle: too far, too dangerous, too hot. Can’t use cruise control: the freeways are so crowded they never move at a constant speed. Won’t ride the bus: turns a 30-minute drive into two hours and ten minutes of wasted time.

Are you doing anything special to save on gasoline? What is it?

It’s four in the morning. The dog’s heavy breathing woke me an hour ago and puts sleep out of the question. Well…the steam-engine effect plus worrying about where the money to pay the vet will come from put sleep out of the question.

I’ve now spent almost $500 on the dog so far this month. The billing cycle closes on the 20th; today is only the 9th: plenty of time to rack up more costs against the amount available to spend—which also has to cover food, gas, and all other necessities.

In spite of four Benadryls, the dog can barely breathe through her nose. At this point she gets ten pills a day and four doses of eyedrops. She’s now developing the cracked, scaly skin around her nose said to be a symptom of lupus, another wildly expensive chronic disease. In saner moments, I think I should put her down. But in fact most of the time she seems pretty lively: she eats well, she plays with her toys, and although she can no longer run after the toys, she still wants them thrown and she still retrieves forever, albeit at a walk instead of a run. She’s as alert as a 13-year-old dog gets. Is a stuffy nose a capital offense? Or running the human into bankruptcy?

The thing that’s frosting my cookies here is that after two weeks of dosing her with antibiotics and smearing a veterinary ear ointment on her nether parts-a procedure that puts me at risk of having my hand removed at the ankle—she still stank until I broke out a tube of Myconazole 7, which brought an end to the problem in two days flat. Same as it brings an end to similar problems in a human female. In other words, $10 worth of an over-the-counter antifungal did what $500 worth of veterinary care did not do.

Since it’s not possible to get the stuff up inside the dog (not and live to tell about it, anyway), it may be that two rounds of $50 antibiotics were necessary. But as far as I can tell, they did little or nothing to clear up the infection. What worked was the grocery-store ointment. It would have helped a great deal if the vet had suggested this first, rather than clipping me for drugs that I can’t afford and that don’t seem to have done much.

That makes me reluctant to drag her back in over the nasal congestion. I suspect that every time I take the dog to the vet, the vet takes me to the cleaners.

But she’s doing the same thing Walt did at the end of his life: sticking to me like she was glued on. She won’t let me out of her sight-she follows me if I get up to go to the bathroom. The “Velcro dog” effect, IMHO, is not a good sign. Dogs, being social animals, want to hang out with other pack members, but it’s not their nature to be on top of each other all the time. When this happens, it means the dog is uncomfortable or in pain and is seeking reassurance. So, there’s probably more at work here than simple old age.

Sigh.

Today the Great Desert University will confer degrees on an astonishing EIGHT THOUSAND students, enough men and women to populate a small town. GDU is a learning factory and most of these degrees rolled off the assembly line, one of the few remaining products stamped Made in America.

Even so, many of our finest faculty were not. Made in America, that is. Nor were quite a few of our students.

Many of today’s graduating seniors, master’s degree holders, and Ph.D.’s are first-generation college students, often children of immigrants-especially those who attend the westside campus, which serves a large working-class population. With just a slightly stronger recruitment effort and some credible support from the throne, the West campus could be a Hispanic-serving institution, a status that opens doors for grants, scholarships, internship, and employment opportunities for all its students. But Hispanics make up only one contributor to the cosmopolitan nature of the enormity that is the four combined campuses: walk across the main campus and you will hear languages from all around the globe.

It’s an exciting polyglot campus whose intellectual and cultural diversity build sophistication for every student who attends classes there. That’s quite a remarkable thing, considering that just a decade or two ago, the place was something of a backwater.

For a first-generation college student, graduation marks a truly huge milestone, not only for the individual but for her or his family. These young (and sometimes not-so-young) people, many of whom have worked their way through school, have achieved a tremendous accomplishment, often against tall odds.

When you’re in the trenches, it’s easy to generalize from evidence of plagiarism and near-illiteracy that all U.S. college students are desperately wanting in every way and to conclude that the next generation is racing to Hell on a skateboard. That’s because the worst episodes and the most recalcitrant students take center stage in your consciousness. The ones who don’t give you trouble tend to fade into the background. But in contrast to the plagiarized paper and the incompetent efforts turned in this semester, I also saw one paper whose quality was on the professional level-a proposal that a charitable foundation support a program for blind children-and in fact, its authors intend to present it to the foundation’s board. Two or three other papers were excellent, and the rest were adequate.

No doubt among those 8,000 new graduates, the proportion of the competent and the truly excellent is the same as it is in any upper-division course.

There’s still hope for America.

1 Comment left at iWeb site

Mrs. Micah

Yay, a hopeful post. 🙂 Sometimes the people who come to the library really get me down about the country. But many are reading and plenty are quite fun, so it’s not as bad as all that.

Thursday, May 8, 2008 – 11:36 AM